Abstract. -- Science fiction in colonial societies
such as Australia can function as what Mary Louise Pratt calls an “art of the
contact zone”—an imaginative space within which groups define themselves and
negotiate their cultural differences. Australian sf falls into three periods
with regard to its treatment of Aboriginal characters and traditions. In the
first, from the 1890s to at least the 1960s, native characters are treated as
subhuman and Aboriginal beliefs and traditions compare unfavorably with
European-derived science and social organization. The second period overlaps the
first, but a new perspective becomes dominant in the 1970s; the emphasis is on
positive qualities of Aboriginal culture and on common ground between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal Australians. After the 1970s, increased awareness of
political injustice and fears of impinging on Aboriginal experience and
intellectual property cause most European-Australians to avoid the topic
altogether. In the same period, however, non-white writers begin to explore the
possibilities of using science-fictional discourse to redefine their own
history, identity, and traditions. Novels such as Sam Watson’s The Kaidatcha
Sung and Archie Weller’s Land of the Golden Cloud open the genre up
to new voices and points of view. These novels may be read as commentaries upon,
and responses to, earlier sf. Some of this new fiction benefits from being read
as part of a cross-cultural dialogue, most notably Terry Dowling’s series of
stories about a high-tech, Aboriginal-controlled, re-mythologized future
Australia.

M. Elizabeth Ginway

A Working Model for Analyzing Third World Science Fiction: The Case of Brazil

Abstract. -- This article offers a working model for analyzing Third
World (or non-Western) science fiction. It examines specific works of Brazilian
sf published during a limited time period, dividing them into discrete
generations or eras based on historical events, then analyzing them in
conjunction with a variety of Brazilian cultural myths. Each period requires a
specific critical approach. While Brazilian texts of the 1960s transform
traditional sf icons, demonstrating an idealization of Brazilian identity and
cultural myths, the dystopian and fantastic literature of the 1970s does the
same in its political and environmental protest, and may be effectively analyzed
by ecofeminist theory. Finally, works in a variety of subgenres, along with
contemporary examples of alien and cyborg stories, provide rich material for
postcolonial analysis and theories of globalization. Other contemporary trends
include the overlap of science fiction, horror, and fantasy as a means to garner
new audiences, new “globalized” or national varieties of fantasy literature, and
an influx of women authors into the genre.

Susana S. Martins

Revising the Future in The Female Man

Abstract. -- In its deployment of both utopian and dystopian narratives,
Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel, The Female Man, avoids the familiar traps of
determinism embedded in narratives of inevitable progress or decline; instead,
it affords its characters the technological ability to move laterally through
time, to encounter alternate versions of themselves and their worlds. In its
depiction of technology, the novel emphasizes mediations and interdependencies
between the categories of the natural and the artificial over the ideals of
purity or essence. The Female Man models a process of re-figuration, and
especially sets out to complicate our notions of time, most obviously by
creating simultaneous chronotopes as a narrative device, but also by suggesting
that by historicizing the present, by revisiting and re-interpreting the past,
we can learn to revise forward. I argue that, in The Female Man,
technology as an activity of re-invention and revision becomes a model for
anticipating the future, precisely by introducing differences from what we
already know. In this context, technology becomes a discourse for the political
potential of the unnatural, and this discourse is one of the reasons science
fiction can be said to offer a counter-argument to deterministic conceptions of
history.

Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont

Rugged Domesticity: Frontier Mythology in Post-Armageddon Science Fiction by
Women
Abstract. -- In the four science fiction novels explored here, the
post-atomic frontier is represented as a modern version of American
civilization’s ongoing cyclical encounter with savagery, as identified by
Rickard Slotkin. Although normalcy assumed critical importance as a means by
which postwar American culture could regenerate from its encounter with savagery
after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the idealization of normalcy
conflicted with other ideologies long associated with frontier mythology,
including those of individualism and progress. Women science fiction writers
worked through these tensions in their novels about post-Armageddon futures in
imaginative ways that belie the reputation of the 1950s as a period of
conformity in women’s literary and social history. Judith Merril’s narrative of
the nuclear frontier, Shadow on the Hearth (1950), represents women in a
variety of interesting ways at the same time as it presents the domestic sphere
conventionally, as the primary site for the production of normalcy. Phyllis
Gotleib’s Sunburst (1964) is a fantasy of ideological regeneration
whereby nuclear disaster produces humans who are “super” and “normal” at the
same time. On the other hand, Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955)
and C.L. Moore’s Doomsday Morning (1957) depict normalcy itself as a
primitive state that must be overcome in order for American society to
progress—but at the expense of their female characters. We argue that the works
of these speculative women, while understandably not entirely free of the
ideological constraints of 1950s normalcy, test these constraints in innovative
ways and are rich with intelligent and critical analyses of the relationship
between savagery and civilization—the very basis upon which American domestic
ideology depends.

Juan C. Toledano
Redondo

From Socialist Realism to Anarchist Capitalism: Cuban
Cyberpunk.
Abstract. -- Cuban cyberpunk developed during the Special Period in Time
of Peace of the 1990s. After the fall of the USSR, Cuba went through its worst
economic and social crisis since 1959. The Revolution seemed to be falling
apart. At the same time, capitalism became the economic credo for the new
globalized economy. Cuba was completely isolated. Among its youngest generation
of sf writers, some adapted the cyberpunk style of the US in the 1980s to
express their new reality. Yoss, Vladimir Hernández, and Michel Encinosa created
a new hero, defiant of the late capitalist world and impregnated with a
traditional anarchist view against the state. The new socialist man was replaced
by the new anarchist hero/ine.